Generally, when you go through training, you are taught to take anything clients say about abuse they received seriously, but you always make a point to inform your boss first before you get the police involved. But it’s amazing how scary it can seem when it supposedly happens on your watch without knowing, or more importantly, when you don’t always know for sure if it’s true or not. Still, you get to the bottom of this anyway because it’s your job.
Case in point, My friend works with adults with disabilities, albeit not in direct care like DrJonesHat. He got a scare like that a few months ago. So he works supervising clients at a radio station started by the owner as tech support, usually it’s just assisting with the machines and letting clients in by punching the code on the child proof lock. And this one client walks in who he wasn’t rostered to look after, forces his caretaker to wait outside. The client’s holding himself up in the back room, and my friend tried to be nice, asked if he wanted to sit in on the radio station, but the client said he wasn’t allowed to be in there because he “said some things on the air”.
Then he wants to talk to my friend alone a little later outside the studio and spun vivid tales about how his caretaker outside was withholding his medication in exchange for sex, and would sometimes skip the first step and just go straight tot he sex. He pleaded for his friend not to tell his boss, but my friend did anyway, because it seemed fairly straight forward right? Caretaker abuses client, the abused client doesn’t want anyone to know for fear of retribution, the boss has to know. Except, it wasn’t like that at all.
The answer my friend got was decidedly more heartbreaking than what he originally thought. This client wasn’t being abused, but rather, he had paranoid schizophrenia and delusions of being abused. My friend’s boss told him this wasn’t the first time something like this happened. Worse still, this client was apparently fresh out of being institutionalized and there had been times in the past where people had to “intervene”. In the case of the one that happened following the incident, it was my friend telling the caretaker about what happened before he took the client to see his boss, because the client would listen to him.
It’s worrying when a client comes up to you and talks about being abused by a caretaker, but it’s even more so when you now have no way of knowing if it’s true or not. No one wants to be the guy who let someone get abused like that on their watch, regardless of how many mental faculties they have. But when mental faculties or lack thereof call into question the credibility of these claims, I can only imagine the echoes of “what if, what if, what if...” that would run through someone’s head in that situation.
